I am leading an international group of telecoms experts who have been providing advice to the Obama Transition Team on a range of digital economy, telecoms infrastructure and new media development; an overseas perspective on the problems and opportunities in the USA. One of the reports was on e-science and this was the introductory section.
The following information comes form the ICTRegie (the Netherlands ICT research and Innovation authority) Strategic Plan 2005-2010: Towards a competitive ICT infrastructure for scientific research in the Netherlands.
E-science refers to a worldwide development to bridge the gap between scientists in application domains and the developments of ICT. E-science comes in different flavours, but the common goal is to make the most efficient use of the very fast developing ICT infrastructure in all fields of science and research. The following three lines of action can be distinguished.
* The Virtual Laboratory line is developing software (middleware) providing generic e-science services and generic application-domain oriented services. Examples of generic e-services are workflow management, metadata management and knowledge extraction, content access and browsing, reasoning technologies, and security services. Examples of generic application-domain oriented services are found in areas like bioinformatics, medical informatics, and food informatics. The project involves researchers from public organizations (universities and other research organizations) and private organizations (Philips, Unilever, IBM, LogicaCMG, FEI). * The computational science line is the field of study concerned with constructing mathematical models and numerical techniques and using powerful computers to analyse and solve complex scientific and engineering problems. The vision is to advance innovative, interdisciplinary research where complex multi-scale, multi-domain problems in science and engineering are solved on distributed systems, integrating sophisticated numerical methods, computation, data, networks, and novel devices. * The third line of action is the human and digital interface to end users, including various facilities for visualization. Researchers with clear or partly articulated computational problems in their field need highly skilled personnel to understand and address their issues and provide real and practical solutions.
The prototype services need to be further developed, both to provide better support for the research areas for which they were developed and to broaden their scope to include other research areas. In order to provide the scientific community with stable and reliable products, research activities need to be complemented by (industrial) software engineering development and operational support.
See also:
Global - Broadband - FttH Overview & Statistics
Global - Broadband - Regulating Fibre Access
Global - Infrastructure - Strategies for the Digital Economy
Global - Investing in the Communications Revolution
Global - Smart Grids - Grid IT - where energy meet comms
Global - Smart Grids and the communications revolution
